>>Live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's the cube covering Ansible Fest 2019 brought to you by red hat. >>Welcome back. This is the cubes coverage of Ansible Fest 2019. I'm Stu Miniman. My cohost of the week is John farrier. And this is the cube insights where we share our independent analysis, break down what we're hearing from the community, what we've learned from all of our interviews. John, uh, you know, we knew community would be a big portion of what we did here. Uh, culture and collaboration were things that we talked a lot about that wasn't necessarily what I thought I would be hearing. Uh, you've been talking a lot about how observability and automation are the, the huge wave. We've seen, you know, acquisitions, we've seen IPOs, we've seen investments. So, you know, your, your, your take here as we're wrapping up. Sure, sure. Last to, um, as we said in our opening in the big scene here has been automation for all that's Ansible's kind of rap because they're, you know, they're announcing their main news ants, full automation platform. >>So that's the big news. But the bottom line is where this emerged from was configuration management and supple started out as a small little project that's solved a very specific problem. It solved configuring devices and all the automation around, you know, opening up ports and things that that were important beyond the basic static routing, the old web one. Dot. O web 2.0 model. And it grew into a software abstraction layer for automating because a lot of that stuff, the mundane tasks in configuring networks and servers frankly were boring and redundant. Everyone hated them patches. So easy ground to automate. And I think, um, it's evolved a lot into dev ops because with the cloud scale more devices, just because software's defining everything, it doesn't mean servers go away. So we know that is more servers is more storage, it's in the cloud, it's on premise, it's cloud operations. >>So automation I think, and I'm, my prediction is is that automation will be as big of a category as observability was. And remember we kinda missed observability we saw it as important. We've covered all those companies, but especially in network management on steroids with the cloud. But look what happened. Multiple companies when public big companies getting sold for billions of dollars, a lot of M and a activity observability is the most, one of the most important areas of cloud 2.0 it's not just some white space around network management. The data is super important. I think automation is going to grow into a highly competitive, highly relevant in the lucrative marketplace for companies and I think Ansible is in pole position to capture that with red hat and now red hat part of IBM. I think automation is going to be very big land grab. It's going to be where the value is created. >>I think observability and automation are going to go hand in hand and I think AI and data, those are the things programming infrastructure revolve around those two spheres. I think it is going to be super important. I think that's why the cube is here. We smelled it out, we sniffing it and we can see. We can touch it and the community here, they're doing it. They're there actually have proof points. Yup. These, this community is demonstrating that the process is going to be more efficient. The technology works and the people are transforming and that is a key piece with automation. People can work on other things and it's certainly changing the game. So all three aspects of digital transformation are in lockstep and, and, and, and expanding rapidly. >>Yeah. John, I would expect nothing less than a bold prediction from you on this space. You know, it's only $150 million acquisition, which is really small compared to a lot of the acquisitions that we see these as heck. You know, red hat Ansible didn't get talked about all that much when you know, IBM went and spent over $30 billion for red hat. But absolutely automation is so important that infrastructure is code movement that we've been tracking for quite a long time helps enable automation across the entire stack. A lot of discussion this week here, networking and security, two areas that we know need to make progress and we need to have, you know, less errors. We need to be able to make changes faster and cloud. We just as in the infrastructure space, that configuration management, we need to be able to simplify things. Absolutely. One of the things that will slow down the growth of cloud is that if we can't simplify those environments, so the same type of tooling and where Ansible is trying to, you know, span between the traditional environments and the cloud is to get this working in the containerization cloud native Kubernetes world that we're living in. >>Yeah, and it's still, you're right on, I mean this is the analysis and that it's spot on. I think one of the nuances in the industry landscape is a, when red hat got acquired by IBM for a massive amount of money, everyone's scratching their heads. But if you think about what red hat has done and you know I'm a real big fan of red hat, you are too. They're smart. They make great acquisitions, Ansible, not a big payout. They had coral West, they, they got open shifts there. They're the decouple their operating systems people. They get the notion of systems architecture. I think red hat is executed brilliantly in that systems mindset, which is perfect for cloud computing. I think Arvin Krishna at IBM really understood the impact of red hat and when I talked to him at red hat summit two years ago, right before the acquisition, he had the twinkle in his eye when I asked him about red at, because you can see them connecting the dots. Red hat brings a lot to the table and if IBM doesn't screw up red hat, then they're going to do well and we talk about red hat not screwing up Ansible and they didn't. Now part of it, if IBM doesn't screw up the red hat acquisition, let red hat bring that systems mindset in. I think IBM could use red has a beautiful way to bring a systems architecture into cloud, cloud native and really take a lot of territory down these new cloud native apps. >>John F automation is a force multiplier for customers and Ansible has that capability to be a force multiplier for red hat. When you look at the ecosystem they're building out here, the Ansible automation platform really helps it get customers more in lock steps. So you know, I was talking to the people and said, Oh, you know, AWS has an update. Oh we need to roll the entire core and put out another version. I can't wait for that. I need to be able to decouple the partner activity, which by the way, they talked about how the disk project is the six most popular in get hub decoupling collections might actually put them lower on the on the list, but that's okay because they're solving real customer problems. And it's interesting, John, we talk about the ecosystem here. One of, there's only a couple of other companies other than red hat that can commit without having to go through approval. Microsoft is one of them. So you talk about the, the collaboration, the ecosystem here where this can be, >>let's do the, the thing about Ansible is that it's a double edged sword. There value is also an Achilles heel. And one of the critical analysis that I have is, is that they're not broad enough yet. On and there and there. I won't say misunderstood the customers here in the community, they totally get it. Everyone here loves Ansible. The problem is is that in the global landscape of the industry, they're tiny red hat needs to bring this out faster. I think IBM has to get animal out there faster because they have all the elements kind of popping right now. You got community, very strong customer base, loyal and dynamic. You got champions developing. That's classic sign of success. They got a great product, perfectly fit for this glue layer, this integration layer, you know, below containers and maybe you can even sitting above containers depending on how you look at it. And then finally the ecosystem of partners. Not yet fully robust, but all the names are here. Microsoft, Cisco net app F five kind of feels like VMworld on a small scale. They have to up level it. I think that's the critical problem I see with with these guys is that it's almost too good and too small. >>Yeah. Uh, you know, when I look back at when red hat made the acquisition, there were a handful of companies, most of them embracing open source as to which configuration management tool you're going to do. Ansible did well against them and red hat helped make them the category leader in this space. There is a different competitive landscape today. Just public cloud. You know, Ansible can help, but there's some customers that would be like, Oh, I've got different tooling and it doesn't fit into what I'm doing today. So there's some different competitors in the landscape and we know John, every customer we've talked to, they've got a lot of tools. So how does Ansible get mind share inside the company? They had some great stories that we heard both on the Q from like ING and the Southern company as well as in the keynotes from JP Morgan where they're scaling out, they're building playbooks, they're doing this, but you know, this is not, you know, it's not just push a button to get all of this rolled out. >>The IBM marketing should help here. And if I'm, you know, um, uh, the marketing team at IBM, I'd be like all over this because this is a, a game changer because this could be a digital transformation ingredient. The people equation. The problem is, is that again, IBM to embrace this and Ansible has that glue layer integration. This could be great. Now the benefit to them, I think they're tailwind is they can solve a lot of problems. One nuance from the show that I learned was, okay, configuration management, dev ops, great. The network automation is looking good. Security is a huge opportunity because if you think about the basic blocking and tackling patches, configuration, misconfigurations, automation plays perfect role. So to get beachhead in the enterprise as an extraction layer is to own and dominate those basics. Because think about the big hacks. Capitol one, misconfigured firewall to an S three bucket, that wasn't Amazon's fault, but the data on Amazon, this is automation can solve a lot of these problems, patches, malware, vulnerabilities, the adversaries are going to be all over that. >>So I think the security piece, huge upside position, Ansible and red hat as an abstraction layer to solve those basic problems rather than overselling it could be a great strategy. I think they're doing a good job with that. Uh, it totally, you know, built on simplicity and modularity. Uh, this, this tooling is something that it can sit lots of places in the organization, uh, and help that cultural communication. Uh, I was a bit critical of, uh, you know, enterprise collaboration, uh, that, that top down push that you'd get. Um, but here, you know, you've got a tool that uh, as we, we just had on our final interview with, uh, Pirog, you know, developers, they didn't build this for developers, but developers are embracing it. The infrastructure people are embracing it. It gives a sense of some why we here to why we're here is I think Ansible fast as a community event, which we love. >>But two, I think this is early, you know, days in the Canadian, the coal mine and saying that the Ansible formula for automation is going to be a growth year. That's my prediction. And we have data to back it up. If you look at our our community and the folks out in the cube alumni know no that when we reach out to them and get some data. But here's what supports why I think the automation thing with Ansible and red hat is relevant because it applies what we just talked about. The number one thing that came back from the community stew was focused efforts on better results. Automation from time efficiency days, hours to minutes check. Security is absolutely a top driver for automation. That's a tailwind. The job satisfaction issue is not like a marketing feel. Good thing. People actually liked their jobs when they have to, don't have to come in on the weekends. >>So this automation does align with that. And finally infrastructure and developers re-skilling with new capabilities and new things. Is it just an uplift? So those are the drivers driving the automation. That's why RPA is so hot and this is a critical foundation in my opinion. So you know Ansible's is the leading the wave here in this new automation wave and I think it's going to be a big part because it's controlling the plumbing. Yeah, John wanted the machinery. Johnny is the, the, the future of work. We know that automation is going to be hugely important. You mentioned >>RPA, a huge one. I had an interview with the associate professor from Syracuse university or they're teaching this to education. It's not just, Oh Hey you got to go learn coding and learn this programming language. No, we need to have that. That combination of the business understanding and the technology and automation can sit right at that intersection. What's your big learning point? What did you take away? Yeah, so it is, it's that point here that this is not just to some, you know, cool little tool on the side. This is something you John, we've talked at many shows. Software can actually be a unifying factor inside companies to help build platforms and for customers to help them collaborate and work together. This a tool like Ansible isn't just something that is done tactically but strategically, you know, gets everyone on the same page enables that collaboration isn't just another channel of you know, some other thing that a, I don't want to have to deal with it. >>It helps me get my job better. Increases that job satisfaction. That's so hugely important as to if you think about the digital transformation form of the people, process technology, how many interviews have we done, how many interviews have we done, a companies we've talked to where they have the great product and on the process side to address the process. They have the tech but they fail on the people side. It's the cultural adoption, it's the, it's the real enablement and I think Ansible's challenge is to take the platform, the capabilities of their, of their, of their software, launch the platform and create value because if they're not enabling value out of the platform that does not cross check with what platforms are supposed to do, which is create value. And John, the thing I want to look for when we come back to this show next year is how much are they allowing customers delivered through data? >>When we heard from their engineering division here, okay, the platforms, the first piece, but how do I measure internally and how do I measure against our peers? We know that that people want to have, there's so much information out there. How am I doing? Am I, where am I on my the five, five step progression and adoption of automation and you know, Hey, am I doing good against my competition or are they smoking me? Well? That's the metrics with the insight piece and tying it to the rail. Now people can say, look, I just saved a bunch of money. I saved some time. That's the business impact and I think you know when you have the KPIs and you had the analysts to back it up, good things will happen. Students been great. All right, John, always a pleasure to catch up with you. We got lot more here toward the second half of 2019 a big thanks to the whole community for of course watching this here at antelopes Fest. Check out the cube.net for all the upcoming shows. Thank you to our whole production team and to our hosts. Red hat for giving this beautiful set right in the middle of the show. And thanks as always for watching the cube.

>> Narrator: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering Ansible Fest 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBE's live coverage of Ansible Fest 2019, here in Atlanta, Gerogia. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host is John Furrier and we're going to dig in and talk a bit about developers. Our guest on the program, Parag Dave, who is senior principle product manager with Red Hat. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Glad to be here, thanks for having me. >> Alright, so configuration management, really maturing into an entire automation journey for customers today, lets get into it. Tell us a little bit about your role and what brings you to the event. >> Yeah, so I actually have a very deep background in automation. I started by doing worker automation. Which is basically about how to help businesses do their processing. So, from processing an invoice, how do I create the flows to do that? And we saw the same thing, like automation was just kind of like a an operational thing and was brought on just to fulfill the business, make it faster and next thing you know it grew like, I don't know, like wildfire. I mean it was amazing and we saw the growth, and people saw the value, people saw how easy it was to use. Now, I think that combination is kicking in. So, now I'm focusing more on developers and the depth tools used at Red Hat and it's the same thing. You know, Parag, you know when you look in IT, you know Automation is not a new term. It's like we've been talking about this for decades. Talk to us a little bit about how it's different today and you know, you talked about some of the roles that are involved here, how does Ansible end up being a developer tool? >> Yeah, you know you see, it's very interesting, because Ansible was never really targeted for developers, right? And in fact, automation was always considered like an operational thing. Well, now what has happened is, the entire landscape of IT in a company is available to be executed programmatically. Before it was, interfaces were only available for a few programs. Everything else you had to kind of write your own programs to do, but now the advent of API's, you know with really rich CLI's it's very easy to interact with anything and not just like in software, you can interact with the other network devices, with your infrastructure, with your storage devices. So, all of the sudden when everything became available, developers who were trying to create applications and needed environments to test, to integrate, saw that automation is a great way to create something that cannot be replicated and be consistent every time you run it. So, the need for consistency and replication drove developers to adopt to the Ansible. And we were, you know cause they had the Ansible, we never marketed to developer and then we see that wow, they are really pulling it down, it's great. The whole infrastructure is code, which is one of the key pillars for devOps has become one of the key drivers for it, because now what you are seeing is the ability for developers to say that I can now, when I'm done with my coding and my application is ready for say a test environment or a staging environment, I can now provision everything I need right from configuring my network devices, getting the infrastructure ready for it, run my test, bring it down, and I can do all of that through code, right? So, that really drives the adoption for Ansible. >> And the could scale has shown customers at scale, whether its on-premises or cloud or Edge is really going to be a big factor in their architecture. The other thing that's interesting, and Stu were talking about this on our opening yesterday, is that you have the networking and the bottom of that stack moving up the stack and you have the applications kind of wanting to move down the stack. So, they're kind of meeting in the middle in this programmability in between them. You know, Containers, Kubernetes, Microservices, is developing as a nice middle layer between those two worlds. So, the networks have to telegraph up data and also be programmable, this is causing a lot of disruption and evasion. >> Parag: Absolutely. >> You're thought on this, 'cause it's DevSecOps beefs DevOps, that's DeVops. This is now all that's coming together. Exactly, and what's happening is, what we are seeing with developers is that there's a lot more empowerment going on. You know, before there was like a lot of silo's, there was like a lot of checks and balances in place that kind of made it hard to do things. It was okay, this what you, developers you write code, we will worry about all this. And now, this whole blending that has happened and developers being empowered to do it. And now, the empowerment is great and with great power comes great responsibility. SO, can you please make sure that you know, what you're using is enterprise grade, that it's going to be you know, you're not just doing things with your break environment So, once everybody become comfortable that yes, by merging these things together, we're actually not breaking things. You're actually increasing speed, 'cause what's the number one driver right now for organizations? Is speed with security, right? Can I achieve that business agility, so that by the time I need a feature develop, by the time I need a feature delivered in production and my tool comes for it, I need to close that gap. I cannot have a long gap between that. So, we are seeing a lot of that happening. >> People love automation, they love AI. These are two areas that, it's a no-brainer. When you have automation, you talk AI, yeah bring it on, right? What does that mean? So, when you think about automation the infrastructure that's in the hands of the operators, but also they want to enable applications to do it themselves as well, hence the DevOps. Where is the automation focus? Because that's the number one question. How do I land, get the adoption, and then expand out across. This seems to be the form that Ansible's kind of cracked the code on. The organic growth has been there, but now as a large enterprise comes in, I got to get the developers using it and it's got to be operator friendly. This seems to be the key, >> The balance has to be there >> the key to the kingdom. >> Yeah, no you're absolutely right. And so, when you look at it, like what do developers want? So, something that is frictionless to use, very quick, very easy, and so that I don't have to spend a lot of time learning it and doing it, right? And so we saw that with Ansible. It's like the fact that it's so easy to use, it's most of everything is in YAML. Which is very needed for developers, right? So, we see that from their perspective, they're very eager now, and they've been adopting it, if you look at the download stats it tells you. Like there's a lot of volume happening in terms of developers adopting it. What companies are now noticing is that, wait that's great, but now we have a lot developers doing their own thing. So, there is now like way of bringing all this together, right? So, it's like if I have 20 teams in one line of business and each team tries to do things their own way, what I'm going to end up with is a lot of repeatable, you know like a lot of work that gets repeated, I say it's duplicated. So, we see that's what we are seeing with collections for example. What Ansible is trying to bring to the table is okay, how do I help you kind of bring things into one umbrella? And how can I help you as a developer decide that, wow I got like 100 plus engine extra rolls I can use in Ansible. Well, which one do I pick? And you pick one, somebody else picks something else, Somebody creates a playbook with like one separate, you know one different thing in it, versus yours. How do we get our hands around it? And I think that's where we are seeing that happen. >> Right open star standpoint. I see Red Hat, Ansible doing great stuff and for the folks in the ivory tower, the executive CXO'S. They hear Ansible, glue layer, integration layer, and they go, wait a minute isn't that Kubernetes? Isn't Kubernetes suppose to provide all this stuff? So, talk about where Ansible fits in the wave that's coming with Kubernetes. Pat Gelsinger at VMware, thinks Kubernetes is going to be the dial-tone, it's going to be like the TCP/IP like protocol, to use his words, but there's a relationship that Ansible has with those Microservices that are coming. Can you explain that fit? >> You hit the nail on the head. Like, Kubernetes is like, we call it the new operating system. It's like that's what everything runs on now, right? And it's very easy for us, you know from a development perspective to say, great I have my Containers, I have my applications built, I can bring them up on demand, I don't have to worry about you know having the whole stack of an operating system delivered every time. So, Kubernetes has become like the defactual standard upon which things run. So, one of the concepts that has really caught a lot of momentum, is the operator framework, right? Which was introduced with the Kubernetes, the later Razor 3.x. Some of that, and operator framework, it's very easy now for application teams. I mean, it's not a great uptake from software vendors themselves. How do I give you my product, that you can very easily deliver on Kubernetes as a Container, but I'll give you enough configuration options, you can make it work the way you want to. So, we saw a lot oof software vendors creating and delivering their products as operators. Now we are seeing that a lot of software application developers themselves, for their own applications, want to create operators. It's a very easy way of actually getting your application deployed onto Kubernetes. So, Ansible operator is one of the easiest ways of creating an operator. Now, there are other options. You can do a Golang operator, you can do Helm, but Ansible operators has become extremely easier to get going. It doesn't require additional tools on top of it. Just because the operator SDK, you know, you're going to use playbooks. Which you're used to already and you're going to use playbooks to execute your application workflows. So, we feel that developers are really going to use Ansible operators as a way to create their own operators, get it out there, and this is true for any Kubernetes world. So, there's nothing different about, you know an Ansible operator versus any other operator. >> With no chains to Kubernetes, but Kubernetes obviously has the cons of the Microservices, which is literally non-user intervention. The apps take of all provisioning of services. This is an automation requirement, this feeds into the automation theme, right? >> Exactly, and what this does for you is it helps you, like if you look at operator framework, it goes all the way from basic deployers, everybody's use to, like okay, I want instantaneous deployment, automatically just does it. Automatically recognize changes that I give you in reconfiguration and go redeploy a new instance the way it should. So, how do I automate that? Like how do I ensure that my operator that is actually running my application can set up it's own private environment in Kubernetes and then it can actually do it automatically when I say okay now go make one change to it. Ansible operator allows you to do that and it goes all the way into the life cycle, the full five phases of life cycle that we have in the operator framework. Which is the last one's about autopilot. So, Autoscale, AutoRemedy itself. Your application now on Kubernetes through Ansible can do all that and you don't have to worry about coding at all. It's all provided to you because of the Ansible operator. >> Parag, in the demo this morning, I think the audience really, it resonated with the audience, it talked about some of the roles and how they worked together and it was kind of, okay the developers on this side and the developers expectation is, oh the infrastructure's not going to be ready, I'm not going to have what I need. Leave me alone, I'm going to play my video games until I can actually do my work and then okay, I'll get it done and do my magic. Speak a little bit to how Ansible is helping to break through those silo's and having developers be able to fully collaborate and communicate with all their other team members not just be off on their own. >> Oh yeah, that's a good point, you know. And what is happening is the developers, like what Ansible is bringing to the table is giving you a very prescriptive set of rules that you can actually incorporate into your developer flows. So, what developers are now doing is that I can't create a infrastructure contribution without actually having discussions with the infrastructure folks and the network team will have to share with me what is the ideal contribution I should be using. So, the empowerment that Ansible brings to the table is enabled cross team communications to happen. So, there is prescriptive way of doing things and you can create this all into an automation and then just set up so that it gets triggered every time a developer makes a change to it. So, internally they do that. Now other teams come and say, hey how are you doing this? Right, 'cause they need they same thing. Maybe you're destinations are going to be different obviously, but in the end the mechanism is the same, because you are under the same enterprise, right? So, you're going to have the same layer of network tools, same infrastructure tools. So, then teams start talking to each other. I was talking to the customer and they were telling me that they started with four teams working independently, building their own Ansible playbooks and then talking to the admins and next thing they know everybody had the full automation done and nobody knew about it. And now they're finding out and they were saying, wow, I got like hundreds of these teams doing this. So, A, I'm very happy, but B, now I would like these guests to talk to each other more and come up with a standard way of doing it. And going back to that collections concept. That's what's really going to help them. And we feel that with the collections it's very similar to what we did with Operator Hub for the OpenShift. It's where we have certified set of collections, so that they're supported by Red Hat. We have partners who contribute theirs and then they're supported by them, but we become a single source. So, as an enterprise you kind of have this way of saying, okay now I can feel confident about what I'm going to let you deploy in my environment and everybody's going to follow the same script and so now I can open up the floodgates in my entire organization and go for it. >> Yeah, what about how are people in the community getting to learn form everyone else? When you talk about a platform it should be if I do something not only can by organization learn from it, but potentially others can learn from it. That's kind of the value proposition of SaaS. >> Yes, yes it and having the galaxy offering out there, where we see so many users contributing, like we have close to a hundred thousand rolls out there now and that really brought the Ansible community together. It was already a strong community of contributors and everything. By giving them a platform where they can have these discussions, where they can see what everybody else is doing, it's the story is where you will now see a lot more happening like today, I think it was Ansible is like the top five Get Up projects in terms of progress that are happening out there. I mean the community is so wide run, it's incredible. Like they're driving this change and it's a community made up of developers, a lot of them. And that's what's creating this amazing synergy between all the different organizations. So, we feel that Ansible is actually bringing a lot of us together. Especially, as more and more automation becomes prevalent in the organizations. >> Alright, Parag want to give you a final word, Ansible Fest 2019, final take aways. >> No, this is great, this is my first one and I'd never been to one before and just the energy, and just seeing what all the other partners are also sharing, it's incredible. And Like I said with my backgrounds automations, I love this, anything automation for me, I think that's just the way to go. >> John: Alright, well that's it. >> Stu: Thank you so much for sharing the developer angle with us >> Thank you very much. >> For John Furrier, I'm Stu Miniman. Back to wrap-up from theCUBe's coverage of Ansible Fest 2019. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (intense music)

>>Live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's the cube covering Ansible Fest 2019. Brought to you by red hat. >>Welcome back. Everyone's cubes live covers here in Atlanta for Ansible Fest. Here's the cube covers. Have red hats event around automation for all. John Ford's do many men. Our next guest is Joe Fitzgerald, Cuba Lum, vice president, general manager of the management business unit at red hat. Great timing for Ansible. Great to have you back on the cube. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. And it's great to have you here at Ansible Fest. Super essential for camera timing about Ansible. Let's do an, I did our intro, uh, analysis and platformization of automation. Big, big move, big news. But there's a bigger trend at play here around automation. Why is the timing now for automation discussions with Ansible? So good. The demand for automation is so broad in enterprises, right? They're trying to do everything from, you know, dev ops, tool chains to IOT devices. >>I'm trying to deploy things faster, uh, you know, fix security vulnerabilities faster. It's all about speed, agility, efficiency. It all comes back to automation. And the news here is the general availability, although available in November as announced on keynote of the Ansible automation platform. So this is something that's been going on for a while and I suppose just been grown weighing now it's a platform. What's in the platform? Why is it important? Why should customers care? So, uh, you know, we've been on this journey with Ansible which started off as this incredibly simple, elegant architecture and a way to automate things. And what's happened over the past couple of years is it's exploded in terms of the number of people who are using it, the number of people who are generating automation integration. Um, and so in working with a lot of customers, right, what we saw the need for was really to help them collaborate and scale their automation efforts. >>Um, scale, you know, who could, you know, build, reuse, share, uh, score content and track it. Really important. So we put a lot of those efforts into the platform to take it to the next level. Really. You know, we've been talking about Ansible, gum stew, going back when you know, 2014 OpenStack, I think I remember we are first talking about the cube. It had a cult following when it emerged. You guys acquired it at what, the next year, 2015 roughly. Um, but Annabelle had this cult following of people who just loved to get into the configuration side of things, make them go better. You guys acquired it, done well with it, kept it going, get the community flywheel, keep rolling a lot of progress since then. So what are you most proud of? What's the most notable things? Oh, the growth of the Ansible journey. What's, what's the big story there? >>So, uh, it's almost four years since red hat acquired Ansible. And I remember when I proposed acquiring Ansible and swell was this small, you know, Eastern U S company with sort of a community cult following, but very small in terms of, you know, commercials and, and reach and stuff like that. Mostly focused on the configuration space. Like a lot of the other automation tools over the past four years. Probably the best thing we did that redhead is really good at is we let the community do what the community does best, right? The innovation, the number of contributors, the amount of Ansible integration modules, playbooks has exploded, right. Uh, if you were in the keynote this morning, um, it was number six on the, you know, repository list out of 100 million, you know, almost, you know, just a massive amount of projects and here it is at number six. >>So we didn't perturb the community, we actually helped it grow and we've been able to help the technology evolve from a config automation product and technology into this very broad spectrum. Now enterprise automation platform that crosses domains like, you know, networks and security and storage and cloud and windows. Just a phenomenal, uh, you know, growth in it. Yup. Show help. Explain how platform sets up Ansible for it future. They talked in the keynote a little bit about starting with some of the, uh, kinda core partners in the collections that they're offering. But in the future for a platform to really be a platform, it needs to be something that users themselves can build on top of. So, you know, help us understand where it is today. You know, when it first announced here for November, um, and where it shows shall be going in the future. >>So we didn't use the platform word lightly. Um, I think that, you know, platform has a set of connotations and, and it's sort of a set of requirements. What we saw was that different teams and groups inside organizations, we're bringing Ansible in and using the technology and having very good success in their particular area. Then what we saw was these teams were trying to share automation and collaborate across organizations. Then even in the community, there's tens of thousands of rolls and playbooks out there that the community has built. There might be 300 that do the same thing, which is the best one, which, which one are people using? Uh, you know, how successful is it? How long does it take? Um, what we found was that they needed a bunch of tools to be able to collaborate, track, uh, analytics about stuff so that they could share and collaborate at a higher scale. >>Yeah. I, that's one of the great value propositions when we talk about SAS is if it's done well, not only can I share internally, but I can learn from others that have used the platform and make it easier to take advantage of that. So is that part of that vision that you see with the platform? Yeah, so I mean, there's a couple different ways of sharing. If you're running a SAS service, then you know, a central person is coordinating the sharing and things like that. What we tried to do with the, with the Ansible platform is basically enabled the way that people can share content without having to go through a central, you know, agent, if you will. So we provide services and things to help them manage their, their content, you know, with uh, you know, uh, galaxy and collections and things like that. >>Um, it's all about organizing and being able to share content in a way, uh, to make them more efficient. Should I talk about the trends around, um, you've done it. First of all, you done a great job with Ann's book. Congratulations. Um, the big fan of that company and you guys did a good job of it. As it goes full, where you're thinking about cloud complexities as people start looking at the cloud equation, hybrid and cloud 2.0 and the enterprise complexity still is coming as more of it. How do you guys see that? How are you viewing that, um, that marketplace because it's not just one vertical, it's all categories. So how are you guys taking animal to the next level? How you guys look at that, managing those complexities that are around the corner? Yeah. So if you think about it, you know, everybody's moving towards a multi, multi hybrid cloud, you know, sort of configuration, right? >>Um, each one of these platforms and clouds has their own set of tools which work really well perhaps in their particular cloud or their silo or their environment. If you're an organization and you're running multi-cloud, you're responsible for automating things that might span these clouds. You don't want to have different silos of automation tools and teams that only work in one cloud or one environment. So the fact that Ansible can automate across these, both on premise and in the public clouds, multiple public clouds, across domains, network storage, compute, create accounts, uh, you know, do all sorts of things that you're gonna need to do. So it's one automation technology that will span the complexity of those environments. So it really, it's, I don't see how people are going to do it otherwise without fielding lots of people and lots of tools. You know, we were talking with Stephanie and Sue and I talked on our intro insights segment around the word scale has been kicked around, certainly is changing a lot of the landscape on how companies are modernizing the open source equation, but it's also changing the people equation. >>I want you to explain your vision on this because I think this is a key point that we're seeing in our community where people have told us that automation provides great efficiency, et cetera. Good security, but job satisfaction is a real big part of it. You know, people, it's a people challenge. This is about people, your view on scale and people. So organizations are under tremendous pressure right now to do more, right? Whether it's deploying new application faster to close security vulnerabilities faster, uh, to move things around to, to, to right size, you know, resources and applications and things like that. And you know, Ansible allows them to do that in a way where they can be much more efficient and be much more responsive to the business, right? Otherwise, you know, you see some of the customer testimonials here where the amount of time goes down from six hours to five minutes, the teams can be far more productive. >>Um, it, it really gives job satisfaction because they can do things that were almost impossible to automate before by using Ansible to automate network storage and compute in the same playbook. Before, those were three different tools or three teams and people of solving some of the same problems in different areas. And this is where playbooks can be a problem and an opportunity because we have too many playbooks, you have to know which playbook to be available. I mean you can almost have a playbook of playbooks and this is kind of a opportunity to use the sharing collaboration piece. What's your rich to thought on that as that playbook complexity comes in as more playbooks enter the organizations, you know, there's a lot of deployment of the same kind of stack or the same kind of configuration and things like that. So you know, it's really extending community beyond, you know, you know, working on code into working on content, right around automation. >>So if somebody wants to deploy engine X, I think there's over 300 different, you know, playbooks to deploy engine X, right? We don't want to have 5,000 playbooks to deploy engine X. Why can't there be a couple that people take and say, wow, this is perfect. I can tweak it from my organization, integrate my particular systems, and I can hit the ground running instead of trying to either start from a blank page or to go sift through hundreds of almost close, uh, you know, playbooks that do sort of the same thing a lot of times. David's big time. Enormous. Alright. >>So Joe, congratulations on the four years of just continued growth, you know, great momentum in the community wanting to touch on, you know, the, the, the big move, uh, you know, in the last year is, you know, IBM spending, you know, quite a few dollars to, to acquire red hat. What will this mean for kind of the reach and activity around Ansible in the community, the IBM acquisition. >>So IBM had been involved in Ansible in a number of their, you know, products, right? In terms of integration into Ansible. So they have teams and folks within IBM that obviously got Ansible all before the acquisition. Um, I think that it's, it's highly complimentary. IBM has very strong capabilities around management and monitoring, security and things like that. All of those things inevitably turn to automation. Right. Um, so I think it really, um, it only gives us access to IBM and, and they're sort of, you know, their their channel and their accounts in their, and their reach, but also their teams that have these, these sets of technologies, um, that are natural compliment, you know, whether it's Watson driving Ansible or security or network monitoring, driving Ansible automation. It's a really powerful combination. >>Yeah. I also just want to get your kind of macro level view on automation. I sat on a panel talking to CIS admins about careers and it was the number one thing that they felt they needed to embrace. We see like the RPA community probably in adjacency to what you see heavily pushing automation, uh, you know, help explain how important automation is and that it's not, you know, just a silver bullet also. >>Yeah. So, you know, a lot of times people are, you know, the, the sort of the easy, um, you know, description is automation's gonna eliminate jobs or things like that. I think it's more like sort of the power tool analogy. You know, you know, if you had a, you know, a hammer and a screwdriver before, now you've got a power screwdriver and a pneumatic hammer and uh, you know, all sorts of additional things. They're force multipliers for these people to do broader, bigger things faster, right? Um, and that's what every organization is driving them to do. How agile can you be our competition deployed something, how fast can we deploy it and how many, you know, new releases a week. Can we deploy, um, when security hits, you know, how fast can we close the vulnerabilities that hours, days, weeks, or can we do it in minutes? >>The old expression, if you, if you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But if you're an agile, you can adjust to figure out the opportunity. It's kind of awesome kind of quote there. This speaks to the changes. I want to get your thoughts. Last question for you is, as someone who's been in the industry for awhile, we've first interviewed and I think 2014 at OpenStack when we first started chatting around the industry. So much has changed now more than ever. The modern enterprise is looking at cloud impact, operating as an operating model, cloud one, Datto, Amazon compute, storage standups software, and they're piece of cake startups. We're doing it now as enterprises really want to crack the code on cloud software automation. Observability these new categories are emerging, kind of speaks to this cloud 2.0, how would you describe that to folks if, if asked, what's the modern era enterprise cloud architecture look like? >>What is cloud 2.0, how would you take a stab at that definition? So I would say after all these years, cloud is really entering its infancy and what does that mean? We're just starting now to appreciate what can be built in cloud and we're going to get a big boost soon with five G, which is gonna, you know, increase the amount of data, the amount of, uh, you know, edge devices, uh, IOT and things like that. Um, the cloud is becoming, you know, the first choice for people when they build their architectures and their business. Um, it's gonna fundamentally change everything. So I think, you know, some people, what's the quote? You know, some people overestimate, you know, what the technology can do in the short term and underestimate what it can do in the longterm. We're now getting to that point where people are starting to build some really powerful cloud based applications. See this as a big wave then big time wave. Yeah. I mean, we had a quote still on the cube last week. Data is the new software, so software, abstractions, automation. This is the new way. I mean, it's a whole new architecture. So exciting. Thanks for coming on the cube. Appreciate juncture having thanks. We're here at the Asheville Fest, the Cuban Chalfont stupid men. Break it down. The analysis, getting into the automation for all conversation. Big category developing. We're covering it here. Live back more after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's theCUBE covering Ansible Fest 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE. We are broadcasting live here, in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman, my co-host, TheCUBE's coverage of Red Hat, Ansible Fest. This is probably one of the hottest topic areas that we've been seeing in Enterprise Tech emerging, along with observability. Automation and observability is the key topics here. Automation is the theme, Stu, Ansible just finished their keynotes, keynote analysis, general availability of their new platform, the Ansible Automation Platform is the big news. It seems nuanced for the general tech practitioner out there, what's Ansible doing? Why are we here? We saw the rise of network management turn into observability as the hottest category in the cloud 2.0. companies going public, lot of M&A activity, observability is data driven. Automation's this other category that is just exploding in growth and change. Huge impact to all industries and it's coming from the infrastructure scale side where the blocking and tackling of DevOps has been. This is the focus Ansible and their show Automation for all, your analysis of the keynote, What's the most important thing going on here? >> So John, as you said automation is a super hot topic. I was just at the New Relic show talking about observability last week, we've got the Pager Duty show also going on this week. The automation is so critical. We know that IT can't keep up with things if they can't automate it. It's not just replacing some scripting. I loved in the keynote the talked about strategically thinking about automation. We've been watching the RPA companies talk about automation. There's lots of different automation, there's the right way to do it and another angle, John, that we love covering is what's going on with Open Source? You were just at the Open Core summit in San Francisco. The Red Hat team very clear, Open Source is not their business model. They use Open Source and everything that Red Hat does is 100% Open Source and that was core and key to what Ansible was and how it's created. This isn't a product pitch here, it is a community, John this is the 6th most active repository in GitHub. Out of over 100 million repositories out there, the 6th most active. That tells you that this is being used by the community, it's not a couple of companies using this, but it's a broad ecosystem. We hear Microsoft and Cisco, F5, lots of companies that are contributing as well as just all the Nusers. We heard JP Morgan in the keynote this morning, so a lot of participation there. But it is building out that sweep with a platform that you talked about, and we're going to spend a lot of time the next few days understanding this maturation and growth. >> Yeah, the automation platform that they announced, that's the big news. The general availability of their automation platform and Stu, the word they're using here is scale. This is something that you brought up the Open Core summit which I attended last week was the inaugural conference, lot of controversy. And this is a generational shift we are seeing the midst of our own eyes right in front of us, on the ground floor of a shift in Open Source community. How the platform of open source is evolving. What Amazon, now Azure and Google and the others are doing is showing that scale has changed the game in how Open Source is going to not only grow and evolve but shape application developers. And the reason why Ansible is so important right now and this conference is that we all know that when you stand up stuff, infrastructure, you've got to configure the hell out of it. DevOps has always been infrastructures code and as more stuff gets scaled up, as more stuff gets provisions, as more stuff gets built and created, the management and the controlling of the configurations, this has been real hotspot. This has been an opportunity and a problem. Anyone who's here, they're active because you know, this is a major pain point. This is a problem area that's an opportunity to take what is a blocking and tackling operational role, configuring standing up infrastructure, enabling applications and making it a competitive advantage. This is why they game is changing. We're starting to see platforms not tools. Your analysis, are they positioned? Was this keynote successful? >> Yeah, John. I really liked what Robyn Bergeron came out and talked about the key principles of what Ansible has done. It's simplicity, it's modularity and it's learning from Open Source. This project was only started in 2012. One of the things I always look at is in the old days you wanted to have that experience. There's not compressions algorithm for experience. Today, if I could start from day one today, and build with the latest tools, heavily using DevOps, understanding all of the experience that's happened in Open Source, we can move forward. So from 2012 to 2015 Red Hat acquired Ansible, to today in 2019, they're making huge growth and helping companies really leverage and mature their IT processes and move toward true business innovation with leveraging automation. >> Stu, this is not for the faint of heart either. These are rockstar DevOps infrastructure folks who are evolving in taking either network or infrastructure development to enable a software extraction layer for applications. It's not a joke either. I mean they've got some big names up on stage. One tweet I want to call out and get your reaction to. JP Morgan, his presentation the exec there, a tweet came out from Christopher Festa, "500 developers are working to automate business processes leading to among other benefits, 98% improvement in recovery times. What used to take 6 - 8 hours to recover, now takes 2 - 5 minutes." Christopher Festa. Stu. >> So John, that's what we wanted. How can we take these things that took hours and I had to go through this ticketing process and make that change. What I loved of what Chris from JP Morgan did, is he brought us inside and he said look, too make this change it took us a year of sorting through the security, the cyber, the control processes. We understand there's not just oh hey, lets sprinkle a little DevOps on everything and it's wonderful, we need to get buy in from the team, and it can spread between groups and change that culture. It's something that we've tracked in Red Hat for years and all of these environments. This is something that does require commitment, because it's not just John taking oh I scripted something, and that's good. We need to be able to really look at these changes because automation, if we just automate a bad process, that's not going to help out business. We really need to make sure we understand what we're automating, the business value and what is going to be the ramifications of what we're doing. >> Well one of the things I want to share with folks watching is research that we did at SiliconAngle, theCUBE and Wikibon as part of our CUBE insights, Stu I know you're a part of this. We talked to a bunch of practitioners and customers, dozens of our community members and we found that observability we've just pointed out, has been an explosive category. That automation has been identified, and we're putting a stake in the ground, right here in theCUBE as one of the next big sectors that will rise up as a small little white space will become a massive market, automation. You watch that cloud 2.0 sector called automation. Why? The reasoning was this, here's the results of our survey. Automations quickly becoming a critical foundational element of the network as enterprises focus on multi-cloud, network being infrastructures, service and storage, and multi-cloud rapid development and deployment. Software to find everything's happening, pretty much we've been covering that on theCUBE. And most enterprises are just grappling with this concept and see opportunities. The benefit that people see in automation as we've discovered, Stu, are the following: 1. Focused on focused efforts for better results, efficiency, security is a top driver on all these things. You've got to have security built into the software, and then automation is creating job satisfaction for these guys. This is mundane tasks being automated away. So people are happier so job satisfaction. And finally, this is an opportunity to re-skill. Stu, these are the key bullets points that we've found in talking to our community. Your reaction to those results. >> Yeah John, I love that. Ultimately we want to be able to provide not only better value to my ultimate end user, but I need to look internal. As you said, John, how can I retool some of my sales force and get them engaged. And if you want to hire the millennials, they want to not be doing the drudgery, they want to do something where they feel that they are making a difference. You laid out a lot of good reasons why it would help and why people would want to get involved. John, you know I've talked to a number of government adgencys, when we changed that 40 year old process and now we're doing things faster and better, and that means I can really higher that next generation of workers because otherwise I wouldn't be able to higher them to just do things the old way. >> Stu this is about cloud 2.0 and this is about modernization. You mentioned Open Source, Open Core summit, that is a tell sign that Open Source is changing, the communities are changing, this is going to be a massive wave. Again, we've been chronicling this cloud 2.0, we coined that term, and we're trying to identify those key points, obviously observability, automation. But look, at the end of the day, You've go to have a focused effort to make the job go better you heard JP Morgan pointing out. Minutes versus hours. This is the benefit of infrastructure as code. At the end of the day employee satisfaction, the people that you want to hire that can be redeployed into new roles, analytics, math, quantitative analysis, versus the mundane tasks. Automation is going to impact all aspects of the stack. So final question Stu, What are you expecting for the next two days, we're going to be here for two days, what do you expect to hear from our guests. >> So John, one of the things I'm going to really look at is as you mentioned, infrastructure where this all started. So how do I use it to deploy a VM, Ansible's there. VMware, I've already talked to a number of people in the virtualization community, the love and embrace Ansible. We saw Microsoft up on stage, loving and embracing. As we move towards micro-service architectures, containerization and all of these cloud native deployments, how is Ansible and this community doing? Where are the stumbling blocks? To be honest, from what I hear coming into this, Ansible has been doing well. Red Hat has helped them grow even more, and the expectation is that IBM will help proliferate this even further. The traditional competitors to Ansible, you think about the Chefs and Puppets of the world, have been struggling with that cloud native world. John, I know I see Ansible when I go to the cloud shows, I hear customers talking about it. So Ansible seems to making that transition to cloud native well but there are other threats in the cloud native world. When I go to the serverless conference, I have not yet heard where this fits into the environment. So we always know that that next generation in technology, how will this automation move forward. >> As Red Hat starts getting much more proliferated in major enterprises with IBM, which will extend their lead even further in the enterprise, it's an opportunity for Ansible. The community angle is interesting. I want to get your community angle real quick So I saw a tweet from NetApp, their tagline at their booth is Simplify, automate, orchestrate. Sounds like they're leaning into the Kubernetes world, containers, you've got the start of thinking about software obstructions, this aint the provisioning hardware anymore. Whole new ball-game. Your assessment of Ansible's community presence, I mentioned that was a tweet from Red Hat, I mean NetApp. What's your take on the community angle here? >> John it's all about community. The GitHub's staff speak for themselves, this is very much a community event. Kudos to the team here, a lot on the diversity, inclusion effort, so really pushing those things forward. So John, something we always notice at the tech shows, the ratios of gender is way more diverse at an event like this. We know we see it in the developer communities, that there's more diversity in there, gender and ethnicity. >> Still a lot of guys though. >> Sure there is, by the way, when they took over this hotel, all of the bathrooms are gender-neutral, so you can use whatever bathroom you want there. >> I'll make sure I'm using the right pronouns when I'm saying hello to people. Stu, thanks for Commentary. Keynote analysis, I'm John Ferrier with Stu Miniman, breaking down why we are here? Why Ansible? Why is automation important? We believe automation will be a killer category, we're going to see a lot of growth here, and again the impact is with machine learning and A.I. This is where it all starts, automating the data, the technology and the configurations going to empower the next generation modern enterprise. More live coverage from Ansible Fest after this short break. (Upbeat techno music)

>>Live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's the cube covering Ansible Fest 2019. Brought to you by red hat. >>Welcome back everyone. Live cube coverage here in Atlanta. This is the keeps coverage of Ansible Fest. This is red hat and suppose two days of live coverage. They had a contributor day yesterday before the conference all being covered by the cube. I'm John furrier, Miko Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Chris Gardner, principal analyst at Forrester Gardner. Welcome to the cube. Thanks. See you. Good to talk to you. Hey, analyzing the players in this space is really challenging. You've got a new wave that came out a few months ago. Yep. Laying it all out. Um, certainly the world changed. You go back eight years. Cloud was just hitting the scene on premises. Look good. Data's Stanley was rocking. You're doing network management, you're doing some configuration management now you've got observability, you've got automation apps. The world's changing big time. What's your take? What's this? I mean, it's interesting because the prior versions of that wave focused entirely on configuration management and the feedback I got was, um, the world's a lot bigger than that, right? >>And we have to talk about platforms and you heard it this morning during the keynote about Redhat moving towards an platform and automation platform. And my definition of a platform is things like configuration management, hybrid cloud management, all the various types of automation and orchestration need to be there. But you also need compliance. You need governance, you need the ability to hopefully make a call as to what is actually occurring and have some intelligence behind the automation. And obviously you need the integrations. It's not a situation to simply have as many people as possible, although that's nice as many vendors you work with. But to have real relationships, if you have Microsoft working on automation code with you, if, if Amazon working on automation code with you, that makes a true platform, right? It's John said earlier day a platform needs to be an enabler. And we've even said, if you can't build on top of this, like the collections that Ansible announced here seems like it might fit under that definition. >>And there's an old joke that everything becomes a platform eventually. Right? Um, but I think that, I think it bears it. There's some merit in this one. Um, the other thing is that I'm seeing a lot of folks want a holistic automation solution and the only way you're going to do that is to have a platform that you can build things on top of it and connect the pieces and provide the proper governance. So, um, I'm mostly in agreement with the definition that's been described here and I think you could tackle different ways. Uh, and all the vendors in the space are certainly doing that. Definitely platform thinking is different. Um, you know, the easy way to look at it and the old big data space do, we'll use to cover that was a tool versus a platform, you know, tools, a hammer, everything looks like a nail, did great things. >>One thing great are a few things. Good platform is more of a systems thinking. Yes, yes. And you've got glue layers, you've got data. So it's really more of that systems thinking that separates the winners from the losers, at least at our opinion. Absolutely. I mean, when you looked at who was the leaders in my wave, it wasn't the basics of automating or orchestration and configuration management, they all had that. The, the ones that were winners, where can I do compliance in a different way? Can I actually have people come into the system that aren't it people and make a call on some of these things? Can I apply AI and machine learning to some of this? Can I make some recommendations and hopefully direct people in the right, you know, the way they should go. And you know, the folks that were able to do that Rose to the top, the folks that weren't were average and below. >>Yeah. Chris bring us inside to some of the competitive dynamics here. We understand that, you know, there's a lot of open source here and therefore everybody holds hands and things can buy y'all. But, you know, there's, you know, product tools, there's the public clouds and what they do. And then, you know, Ansible, uh, you know, fit, fits in a lot of different places. Yeah. It's, it's a bit ironic because, uh, you know, this is one of those waves where, and it's very rare that everyone was sitting was, was at least preaching kumbaya. They are all saying that they were friendly with one another. And, and, uh, quite frankly, I, I tend to believe it. We're in a situation right now where you can't get by, especially in a hybrid cloud world. We are going to have resources that live in multiple, you know, AWS and Azure, but also on premises and at the edge. You need to have these integrations. You need to be able to talk to one another. So, um, that said, there's certainly a lot of coopertition going on where people are saying, if I can integrate these tools better, if I could provide a better governance layer, if I can again, hand things off to the enterprise in a way that has not been handed off before that I don't even have to go through an INO group and infrastructure operations group, those are willing, could be the ones that truly succeed in this space. >>Software defined data center, software defined cloud, everything software defined. Yep. These abstraction layers, data and software. We had a guest on the cube a week ago saying, data's the new software I get. Okay, it's nice, nice gimmick. But if you think about it, this abstraction layer, it's like a control plan. Everyone wants to go for these control planes, which is a feature of platform. As this automation platform becomes ultimately the AI platform, how do you see it evolving and expanding? Because you see organic growth, you see certainly key positions, 6 million stars on get hub. I mean, it's running the plumbing. I mean, come on. Like it's not, it's not like it's just some corner case. >>Yeah, yeah. Infrastructure. Yeah. I mean, you know, in an idealistic way, I'd like to see, we us resolve on singular holistic platforms for enterprises. The reality is that's not not the way you can do it today. What I do try to help clients do is at least rationalize their portfolio. If they have 12 different automation products they're running, chances are that's not the best idea. Um, I've actually had situations where someone will say to me, um, I'm running Ansible in one portion of my organization and chef and another, and I say, well, it's some, they do similar things. And the reason for it was because they were stood up organically. Each group kind of figured out the things along the way. And I have to at least guide them and say, you know, where are the similarities? Where can you potentially, you know, move some stuff from there. >>But the cloud discussion, you know, always debate upon, you know, multi-cloud, Seoul cloud, ultimately the workload needs something underneath. And I think workload definition dictates kind of what might be underneath. So it might be okay to have a couple, you know, automation platforms or it could be great to have one. I mean, this is really the eye of the beholder. Beauty is in the eye of the, >>yeah, in my view. Um, I, I've been an analyst for a couple of years before that I was doing this stuff for a living. I have the worst scars and in my view it's, it's not even a matter of how many tools you use. It's putting the workload where it belongs, that matters. And if you could do that with fewer tools, obviously that from an operational level that makes life a lot easier. Um, but I'm not going to say to somebody, you know, completely dismantle your entire automation and orchestration workflow just because I think this one tool is better. Let's talk about how we can, >>that's the worst case scenario because if you have to dictate workloads based on what tool you have, that's supposed to be the other way around. >>Yes. Setting up a nuclear bomb in the data center or in the cloud has never worked. Note to self, don't do that. Yes. One of the interesting conversations we've already been having here at the show is that the tool is actually helping to drive some of the cultural change in collaboration. So, you know, what are you finding in your research? How is that, you know, kind of this admin role and you know, to the cloud in applications. You know, it's interesting. I, we continued to beat the drum that these folks are becoming developers, but we've been beating that drum for a decade now and quite frankly we had to continue to beat it. But what I think is more even more interesting is we have groups starting to pop up in our research that are separate from it, that focus on automation in a way that no one has done before. >>Some we went into it saying, Oh, that's a center of excellence, right? And the teams that we talked to said no, do not call us a center of excellence. A two reasons. One is that term is tainted. Uh, but secondly, we're not one team. There's multiple automation teams. So we're actually starting to call these groups, strike teams that come in and standardize and say, okay, I have a lead architect, a lead robot architects say it's around infrastructure automation. I'm going to standardize across the board and when other groups need to come on board, I have the principles already laid out. I have the, the process is already laid out. I come in, I accelerate that, I set it up and then I back off. I don't own the process and I'm not part of it either. I T's got operations of its own that's got to worry about. >>I'm going between the two and when we talk to especially the fortune 100 they are setting these groups up. Now when I ask them what do you called them? They don't have a name yet, so I think strike team sounds sexy, but ultimately this is not like a, a section of it that's been severed off and becomes this role. It's a completely true committee. I yeah. Oh yeah. I want our falls slow process. Exactly, exactly. And it better fits what the role is. The role is to come in, nail the process, get it automated and the get out. It's not to stand there and be a standards body forever. Um, there's certainly some groups that in some types of automation like RPA where you want them to stick around because you may want them to manage the bots. There's a whole role called bot masters, which is specifically for that role. But most of the time you want them to be part of that process and then you know, hand it back off. >>Yeah. We've seen some interesting patterns. I want to get your thoughts on this as a little bit of a non-sequitur. Want to bring it in, but in the security space you seeing a CSOs chief information security officers building their own stacks internally, they're picking one cloud, Amazon or Azure and they're building all in maybe some hedge with some people working on some backup cloud, but they don't want to fork their talent all on one cloud and they cause they need to be bad ass responsive strike teams for security pressure. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Not as critical with the security side with automation, but certainly relevance. Is that the same thing going on here with this development Durham, this being continued to be as much more around core competency and building internally stacks and building some standards? >>I I, I think it is, and you know what's interesting too is that I work with, I'm on the infrastructure and operations team at Forrester. I talk with INO people all day long, but I work alongside the security team and I said to them a couple of years ago, um, you guys are going to have to get your hands dirty with this stuff that I cover. You guys have to know infrastructure, automation, API APIs, you need to know how to code these things. And I said, are you comfortable telling your sec ops folks, your clients that they go, no, by all means they have to be part of this. So they're okay with them talking to me, talking to them and saying that you need to be part of the infrastructure design process and need to be part of this decision making process. Right. Um, which is different than their sec ops role used to be. So my point is, is that these worlds are not that dissimilar as some people might think they are sec dev ops or whatever we're going to call it. We keep tacking letters onto this thing, uhm, is a actual discipline. And it is a reality in most organizations I talked to the people should. >>So a system has all of these things as data across the system. They have high blood subsystem you're talking about and yet it's this holistic system security and data. Yeah. >>And we're in a world now, especially around things like edge computing where data gravity matters. So all these pieces, you know, it's, if you go back to the old school kind of computer science folks from the, you know, 50 sixties and seventies, they're like, this is not new. We've been thinking systems thinking for awhile, but I think we're finally at a place where we're actually now breaking down the silos that we've been championing to do. So for, >>I got to ask you the analyst questions since you're watching the landscape. Sue wants to jump in, but I want to get this out. So observability became a category at a network management. I mean, network management was like this boring kind of plotting along white space. I mean, super important. People need to do network management. Then in comes the cloud becomes a data problem. Whether it's observability you get to microservices, you got security signal FX, all these companies going public. Um, well a lot of M and a activities basically large segment, a lot of frothiness automation feels like it's growing to be big. Is there startup opportunities here? If, if platforms are becoming being a combination of things, is there room for startups and if so, what would you say? Um, those stars would look like? There are, I think >>what we're seeing is, and it speaks to the observer, observe the word you just said. Um, uh, I can, I can S I can know what it is, but I can't say it. Um, we're seeing the APM vendors move down the stack. We're seeing the infrastructure monitoring vendors move up the stack and in the middle we're seeing them both try to automate the same things. Um, you cannot pull off some of the infrastructure as code automation that we need to pull off without observability, but you can't get that observability unless you are able to pull it from the top of the stack. Um, what we're going to see is consolidation and we're already starting to see it, um, where you're gonna have different groups come together and say, why did have to tools to do this? Why not do one? Um, the reason why you do multiple tools today is because no one is truly strong at the entire stack. >>A lot of the folks that are going down the stack to say that they're not quite infrastructure automation players just yet, but watch this space, they will eventually, Oh, this change happening. Absolutely. Startups getting funded. Do you think there's opportunity to take some territory down? If there's any opportunity? And, and I'm, I'm pushing for this, it's in the AI AI ops space when it comes to these things is actually going beyond where we stand today. So I want to be clear that, um, AI ops is a great concept. The reality of is that we're still a ways away from being practical. I'd like to see not just recommendations from these tools that the startups are providing, but actually trust in them to make the changes necessary. So Chris, it sounds like the antibody automation platform announcement today fits with what you've been saying for the last couple of years. >>So the question is, what's next? Where does the Ansible need to mature and expand and you know, what, what are users asking for that Ansible is not doing today? So a couple things. Um, they did okay, but not fantastic at infrastructure modeling. Ansible. They did okay, but not amazing at what we call comprehension, which is making a call as to, you know, using AI and machine learning to make a call and what the infrastructure layers should look like. To be Frank, no one did really well in that one. So not too, not too bad on that. Um, and the other thing is they need to improve slightly. Is there integration story? They actually have a really good one. You see all the folks that are here. Um, it's just, it's, it's just as hair away from being the best. They're not quite there yet. So, and when, again, when I mean integrations, I don't mean having a laundry list of vendors you work with. >>I mean actually working with them to build code and you saw that this morning where there's the best, uh, right now surprisingly is VMware, but for you Morris built that relationship off for a long time. Um, they work right alongside Microsoft and Google and all these folks to build the code together in the industry. Uh, I think the darkest source of all is probably, and it remains to be seen if they can actually do something that is HashiCorp. Um, Terraform is an interesting player in this entire space. I actually included them in our wave on infrastructure automation platforms and you can argue is it even an automation platform? Quite frankly. Um, uh, I think HashiCorp itself was trying to figure out exactly what it is. But the bottom line is it's got tremendous Mindshare and it works well. So I think that if you watch, if you see the strategy going forward and look at, you know, what they're putting their investments into, they could become a really serious damaging player in this space. Chris Gardner, thanks for coming on the cube, sharing your insights and your research at Forrester forced wave. Check it out. Just came out a couple of months ago. Uh, infrastructure automation platforms. Q three 2019. Chris Gardner, the author here in the Q, breaking it down. I'm John furrier. There's too many men. We'll be back with more after the short break. Thank you.

>>Live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's the cube covering Ansible Fest 2019 brought to you by red hat. >>Welcome back everyone. That's the cubes live coverage for two days here in Atlanta, Georgia for Ansible Fest. I'm John fire with my cohost, stupid man. Andrew has been, Oh Kratos who's here and senior principal product manager at Ansible. Welcome to the cube. Welcome back. Thank you. Good to see you. 2017 you were last on red hat summit. It's like, Oh it was a, it was basically the introduction to the Ansible network basically. So, so much has gone on. One of the things I'm really impressed by this event and why we're here is um, configuration management and super important part of the plumbing. We all know dev ops is infrastructure as code, but as the evolution of cloud and software is changing the game, you start to see visibility into where automation's coming in. This is the whole focus of the event automation for all. It's the theme w w and this is about the core infrastructure. >>So it's not like it's just a random thing. Six most popular in get hub project out of millions. This is real. It's real. It's quite real and especially on the network side. This is something that came out organically. The birth of Ansible network was because it was agent lists, honestly, you know, simple, powerful agent lists. The agent list piece was the piece that really made it really fly for Ansible. Configuration management. By the way, on net networking side when we talked about this before is the most important because that's where it's the most static has one of those where it's been most static. I mean we all know networking, right? But as networking becomes policy base and moves up the stack, we've seen some firms like Cisco trying to figure out their dev net. It's like you starting to see the networking mindset moving up the stack. >>This is super huge change. It's a huge change. But the nice thing is that it's easy to get into. So all the network operators and network engineers, they're still used to using command and config modules with their iOS devices, their iOS devices, Juniper, all those things, right? They don't have to throw away everything they've learned for the past 10 15 years in order to get with Ansible. And then when they go beyond that, then they can start seeing the real power of the platform, which we announced today. So going from command line to programmability is kind of what's happening. Yes, absolutely. And what's the big four, the big key factors right now that are driving this? So a lot of key factors are, I mean, you saw the keynote this morning with Microsoft, that's our, that was a huge, and it'd been doing this for about two years. >>So they started from, from nothing. He chose Ansible and they quickly saw that the power of automation for the networks, but they had to grow it at scale. So that was the big problem was how do we do this at scale while still using all the knowledge that we've learned? So day zero, day one, it's extremely important and obviously we know that, but as we were going down the journey with them from a engineering standpoint, day two became extremely important. And that's what we're, we're focused on now. You know, uh, it was really interesting. Microsoft really talked about that cultural shift. Uh, you know, we've heard in the networking space forever, it was like you're all going to need to become coders. You're going to need to be able to do this to tell us how Ansible is really impacting some of those cultural shifts in a, you know, how is that discussion changed today versus what it might've been a few years ago? >>It's truly half the battle is the culture I like to call it as everyone's talking about digital transformation in a network world, this is an analog transformation in all honesty. This isn't anything about the bits and bytes. You cannot automate anything today. There are lots of point tools to automate networks today, but how are you gonna actually move that into a world where culturally you can have people buy in from the bottom up organically as well as from the top down from the it managers. It's extremely important. So on the platform announcement, the key and as was the Ansible automation platform, where can you just help us understand the relationship between network automation and the automation platform? Because I'll see an you need to move things around the network, but there's a lot of other things being configured as well and automated. What's the relationship between the two? >>So before we had the platform actually ends well network was an actual product. It was a separate skew as a separate offering and we treated it as such as a platform. We were like the first Guinea pigs I like to think of, we were the ones that said let's treat Ansible as a platform and let's move it that way. So we actually went out and built roles. We built modules, we built a network engine, which is a parser, right? Similar like text, FSM, uh, you know, those kinds of things. We put those in galaxy 22,000 downloads later. We proved it. We know that everything that we're doing in galaxy today for Ansible network proves the fact that people are using it as a platform. And we were successful in that, doing that and then telling me yours was that just track record wise, what was it, how many years? >>Oh, that was a year. So to.seven was when we released network engine for parsing, parsing CLI commands, you know, and that moves into the next generation of what we call the day two operations for networking is typically we see network configuration has been a one way street. So you would pull a configuration data from a device, you would have to parse it, you put it in SCM, it's an an SCM and now you actually have to put into a template and then you push it. Right. This has been a one way street typically, and it's an Ansible has been very good at one way streets, but now we're moving towards an Ansible two. Dot nine coming soon is making that a two way street. So integrating the fat collection from module, so when you pull facts from iOS, EOS and XLS, et cetera, treating that data consistently across the board and using that for it. >>Networking is one of the tracks here at this show. What are, what are some of the more popular things? What, what, what? Where's the focus? The focus is, it's across the board. Again, you have people that are it managers that have been doing Ansible for years and now they're saying, Hey look, they're seeing network automation is extremely pervasive. How can we get that into our pipeline? We have ticketing systems. How can we integrate ancil network with our larger business processes? And then tops like top five use cases, the typical backing up systems, uh, from, uh, you know, backup, restore a, and then doing a lot of sorts of true things there too. So making sure that you have all of your, your network configuration data off the box, right? A lot of people are fetching configurations from thousands and thousands devices. That's pretty hard to do. So let's make that easier for them. >>What's been the customer interest and the growth path for network automation? Because I'll see, that makes sense. I see a different product, but now that the automation picture's getting wider and bigger, what's the interest from customers say? The key focus area though on that? Well, we've typically focused on to date and, and from the marketing slides is the number of platforms we've supported. We can always see up to the right, right. We support 10 platforms, 2030, we're up to 65 platform supported. I think we've pretty much proven the fact that I think we can pretty much work on anything. So it's going beyond that and making lives easier for the network operators, engineers holistically. And this event here, what's going on here for you guys here? What specific tracks are doing? Right? So we're actually conversations you having. Yeah, we're talking more about the actual resource modules that are coming in two dot nine I was talking about, which is bringing fact collection and the modules together as a two way street. >>So as people start moving into this day two operations, um, we have a lot of experts here and they're hitting stumbling blocks around. They're managing ginger temp like 500 lines into templates, like on a daily basis. Nobody wants to do that. So we're getting to a place where the people that are really relying on Ansible in it, in the expert field, making it much, much easier for them to look forward. We had Greg on earlier. And um, Robin, they talk about the glue layer that Ansible provides for the folks that are not using Ansible, what's the big message that you'd like to send them? What's the, what's the real, uh, attraction from the customers and why should people be using Ansible? Well, it, yeah, I mean it's, it, it's for everything. I mean, you don't have to, you really don't. I mean, it, it speaks for itself, but it breaks down the barriers. >>If you're a server person, a restorative person or a cloud person or a windows person or a network person, you all have the same language base in Ansible and you can get things done more quickly and more efficiently that way. So one of the other things we were talking to the community about is the, the feedback loops that you have with the community to tell us a little bit about what your teams hoping to get from the users attending and barges. Oh, absolutely. On the animal network side, everything is done transparently in the community. We have weekly, we have a community meetup. We've had this for a long time. Everything's out in the open. Everything's in get hub. Everything that we've done, we've had a contributor day. I don't know if you were here on Monday, it was focused on network. We're pitching this idea around resource modules in the, in the forward strategy of, of the platform as it relates to network, everyone including the contributors, developers, the partners, all of the people that you could see that half the off half the vendors here on the floor, our network partners. >>So they're invested as well. They want this to succeed. So we're extremely proud and happy that they're along for the ride as well. Alright. Maybe explain to our audience what an angry potato is. Uh, it's a, was it a tater, it's an angry tater. Uh, yeah, it's a, the mascot for AWX I believe. And um, yeah, they're fun. The stickers and little plushes. So we're going back to keep sticking appreciation. What's the coolest thing that you're, you've seen this year that you think people should know about? Oh, wow. Um, I think a lot of, a lot of focus around testing and development. So a lot of developers are now writing code. They're rebuilding the wheel themselves. So developers are writing the same stuff over and over and over again. So how can we scale that to say, Hey, why don't we all get together and write the same code and then about testing. >>So once you actually have the code, you have a lot of vendors here on CIC, D testing quality. So we at its Ansible, um, we can talk, and this was Greg, I don't know if you mentioned earlier, but Greg to go into Sprig said, you know, we're really good at making sure, um, playbooks and roles and modules are correct, but we want to make sure that the vendors and the developers like focused on the functionality. We can give them guidance around, um, syntax and correctness, but we want to make sure that the innovation really comes from them. Andrea, talk about this annual Fest this year, 2019 as we run into 2020 coming up towards the end of the year, fall here. Why is this year different? What's important about this year? Um, this seems to be, this almost seems to be an inflection point this year. Why? Why is it so important as what's what's going on right now that makes this event so popular? >>You're seeing convergence in a lot of different activities. The, the silos around you typically say, I'm a, I'm a, you know, I'm, I do Kubernetes or I do network or I do cloud. You're starting to see a lot of these people like, okay, well I have to do a cloud. I have to do a cloud VPN connection using containers and automate the network. So you're starting to see a lot of these different traditional people having to think outside of their traditional areas and have to start thinking about other areas to their, whatever that whatever their technology silo is in their head, they have to start learning or they're being forced to learn around a lot of different things. It's a systems architecture. Absolutely. System says consequences. You can't just dig in the silo. That's the issue. Absolutely. That seems to be the core issue. And also culturally it's collaborative. I mean, who would have thought configuration management be the next social network for enterprises at turning it out to be, yeah, absolutely. Not social network. Literally like Facebook, but you know, thanks to come on. Thank you so much for having said, we're bringing all the action down here at Asheville Fest where dev ops is being operationalized cultural change within organizations, but keep abilities much more of a systems view now. So the networking is a key part of it. I'm John for a stupid man back after this short break.

>>Live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's the cube covering ansible fest 2019 brought to you by red hat. >>Welcome back, everyone. It's theCUBE's live coverage of ansible fest here in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm John Furrier, with my cohost Stu Miniman We're here at Stephanie Chiras, the Vice President and  general manager of the REL Business Unit. Red Hat. Great to see you. We need to see to interview of all your, through your career at IBM. That one gets pulled back back in the fold. Yeah. So last time we chatted at red hat summit, REL8, how's it going? What's the update? >>Yeah, so we launched at summit was a huge opportunity for us to sort of show it off to the world. A couple of key things we really wanted to do there was make sure that we showed up the red hat portfolio. It wasn't just a product launch, it was really a portfolio launch. Um, feedback so far on relate has been great. Um, we have a lot of adopters on their early, it's still pretty early days when you think about it. It's been about, you know, a little over for four or five months. So I'm still early days. The feedback has been good. It's, you know, it's actually interesting when you run a subscription based software model because customers can choose to go to eight when they need those features and when they assess those features and they can pick and choose how they go. But we have a lot of folks who have areas of Reli that they're testing the feature function of. >>I saw a tweet you had, uh, on your Twitter feed, 28 years old, still growing up. Still cool. I mean, 20 years old is, yeah, it's out in the real world and adults, >>no, no. Lennox is run in the enterprises now and now it's about how do you bring new innovation in? When we launched drill eight, we focused really on two sectors. One was how do we help you run your business more efficiently and then how do we help you grow your business with innovation? One of the key things we did, um, which is probably the one that stuck with me the most was we actually partnered with the red hat management organization and we pulled in the capability of what's called insights into the product itself. So all carbon subscription six, seven, eight all include insights, which is a rules based engine built upon the data that we have from, you know, over 15 years of helping customers run large scale Linux deployments. And we leverage that data in order to bring that directly to customers. And that's been huge for us. And it's not only, it's a first step into getting into ansible. Right. >>I want to get your thoughts on where here at ansible Fest Day, one of our two day coverage, the red hat announced the ansible automation platform. Yep. I'll see you. That's the news. Why is this show so important in your mind? I mean you see the internal, you've seen the history of the industries. A lot of technology changes happening in the modern enterprise is now as things become modernized, both public sector and commercial, what's the most important thing happening? Why is this ansible fest so important this year? >>Um, to me it comes down to I'd say kind of two key things. Management and automation are becoming one of the key decision makers that we see in our customers. And that's really driven by they need to be efficient with what they have running today and they need to be able to scale and grow into innovation platforms. So management and automation is a core critical decision points. I think the other aspect is, you know, Linux started out 28 years ago proving to the world how open source development drives innovation. And that's what you see here at ansible fest. This is the community coming together to drive innovation. Supermodular able to provide impact, right from everything, from how you run your legacy systems to how you bring security to it, into how do you bring new applications and deploy them in a safe and consistent way. It spans the whole gambit. >>So Stephanie, you know, there's so much change going on in the industry. You talked about, uh, that you know what's happening in. I actually saw a couple of hello world, uh, tee shirts, uh, which were given out at summit in Boston this year. Uh, maybe help tie together how ansible fits into this. How does it help customers, you know, take advantage of the latest technology and, and, and, and move their companies along to be able to take advantage of some of the new features. >>Yeah. And, and so I really believe of course that, um, an open hybrid cloud, which is our vision of where people want to go. You need Linux. So Lennox sits at the foundation, but to really deploy it in an in, in a reasonable way, in a safe way, in a efficient way, you need management and automation. So we've started on this journey when we launched, we announced at summit that we brought in insights in, that was our first step included in, we've seen incredible uptick. So, um, when we launched, we've seen 87% increase since May. In the number of systems that are Linkedin, we're seeing 33% more increase in coverage of rules-based and hundred and 52% increase in customers who are using it. What that does is it creates a community of people using and getting value from it, but also giving value back because the more data we have, the better the rules get. >>So one interesting thing at the end of May, the engineering team, um, they worked with all the customers that currently have insights, linkedin and they did a scan for um, spectrum meltdown, which of course everyone knows about in the industry. Um, with the customers who had systems hooked up, they found 176,000 customer systems that were vulnerable to spectrum meltdown. What we did was we had an ansible playbook that could remediate that problem. We proactively alerted those customers. So now you start to see problems get identified with something like insights. Now you bring in ansible and ansible tower, you can effectively decide, do I want to remediate? I can remediate automatically. I can schedule that remediation for what's best for my company. So, you know, we've tied these three things together kind of in this step wise function. In fact, if you have a real subscription, you've hooked up to insights. >>If insights finds an issue, there's a fix it by and with ansible a playbook, now I can use that playbook and ansible tower. So really ties through nicely through the whole portfolio to be able to do everything and in it also creates collaboration to these playbooks. Can Be Portable, move across the organization. Do it once. That's the automation piece. Is that, yeah, absolutely. So now we're seeing automation. How do you look at it across multiple teams within an organization? So you could have a tower, a tower Admin, be able to set rules and boundaries for teams. I can have an RL rights, um, it operations person be able to create playbooks for the security protocols. How do I set up a system? Being able to do things repeatedly and consistently brings a whole lot of value in security and efficiency. >>Yeah. Uh, w one of the powers of ansible is that it can live in a heterogeneous environment and you've got your windows environment. You know, I've talked to vmware customers that are using it and, and, and of course in cloud help help us understand kind of the, the rel, you know, why rel plus ansible is a, you know, an optimal solution for customers in those heterogeneous environment. And what I would love, I heard a little bit in the keynote about kind of the roadmap where it's going. Maybe you can talk to about where, where are those, would those fit together? >>Yeah. Perfect. And I think your, your comment about heterogeneous world is, is Keith, that is the way we live. And um, folks will have to live in a heterogeneous as, as far as the eye can see. And I think that's part of the value, right? To bring choice. When you look at what we do with rail because of the close collaboration we have between my team and, um, the team that in the management, bu around insights, our engineering team is actively building rules. So we can bring added value from the sense of we have our red hat engineers who build rail creating rules to mitigate things, to help things with migration. So, um, you asked about brel aid and adoption, we put in in place upgrades of course in the product, but also there's a whole set of rules curated, supported by red hat that help you upgrade to relate from a prior version. So it's the tight engineering collaboration that we can bring. But to your point, it's, you know, we want to make sure that ansible and ansible tower and the rules that are set up bring added value to rail and make that simple. But it does have to be in a heterogeneous world. I'm going to live with neighbors in any data center. Right, >>of course. Yeah. One of the pieces of the announcement that talked about collections a, is there anything specific from, from your team that which should be pointed out about from a collections and the platform announcements? >>Election starts to start to grow. Um, and it brings out sort of that the simplicity of being pulled to it, pulled playbooks and roles and pull that all into one spot. We'll be looking at key scenarios that we pulled together that mean the most Eurail customers. Migration of course is one. We have other spaces of course, where we work with key ecosystem partners. Of course SAP running on rail has been a big focus for us in partnership with SAP. We have a playbook for installing SAP Hana on rel, so this collaboration will continue to grow. I think collections offers a huge opportunity for a simpler experience to be able to kind of do a automated solution if you will. Kind of on your floor automation for all. That's the theme here. That's right. Want to get your thoughts on the comment you made about the analytical analytics capability inside rail. >>This seems to be a key area for insights tying the two things together, so kind of cohesive but d decoupled. I see how that works. What kind of analytical capabilities are you guys serving up today and what's coming around the corner? Cause your environments are changing. A hybrid and multi-cloud are part of what everyone's talking about. Take care of the on premises first. Take care of the public cloud. Now hybrids, now an operating model has to look the same. This is a key thing. What kind of new capabilities of analytics do you see coming? So let me step you through that a little bit cause cause your point is exactly right. Our goal is to provide a single experience that can be on prem or off prem and provides value across both as, as you choose to deploy. So insights, which is the analytics engine that we use built upon our data. >>You can have that on-prem with rail. You can have it off prem with rail in the public cloud. So where we have data coming in from customers who are running rel on the public cloud. So that provides a single view. So if you, if you see a security vulnerability, you can scan your entire environment, which is great. Um, I mentioned earlier, the more people we have participating, the more value comes. So new rules are being created. So as a subscription model, you get more value as you go. And you can see the automation analytics that was announced today as part of the platform. So that brings analytics capabilities to my, you know, first to be able to see what, who's running, what, how much value they're getting out of analytics. That the presentation by JP Morgan Chase was really compelling to see the value that automation is delivering to them. >>For a company to be able to look at that in a dashboard with analytics automation, that's huge value. They can decide, do we need to leverage it here more? Do we need to bring it value value here? Now you combine those two together, right? It's it and being informed as the best. I want to get your reaction, Tony, we made a comment on our openings to align our opening segment around the JP Morgan comment, you know, hours, two minutes, two minutes, depending upon what the configuration is. Automation is a wonderful thing where we're pro automation, as you know, uh, we think it's gonna be a huge category, but we took a, um, uh, a survey and set our community and we asked our practitioners in our community members about automation and they came back with the following. I wanna get your reaction for major benefits. Automation focused efforts allows for better results. >>Efficiency, security is a key driver and all this. You mentioned that automation drives job satisfaction and then finally the Infrastructure Dev ops folks are getting re-skilled up the stack as the software abstraction. Those are the four main points of why is impacting enterprise. Do you agree with that? Could you have any comments on some of those points? No, I do. I agree. I think skills is one thing that we've seen over and over again. Um, skills is, skills is key. Um, we see it in Linux. We have to help write bridge window skills into Linux skills. I think automation that helps with skills development helps not only individuals but helps the company. Um, I think the second, second piece that you mentioned about job satisfaction, at the end of the day, all of us want to have impact and when you can leverage automation for one individual to have impact, right, that that is much broader than they could do before with manual tasks. >>That's just, that's just stu and I were talking also about the, one of the keynote key words that kept on coming out in the, in the keynote was scale scales driving a lot of change in the industry at many levels. Certainly software automation drives more value when you have scale because you're scaling more stuff. You can manually configure this stuff at scale. So software certainly is going to be a big part of that. But the role of cloud providers, the big cloud providers, I see IBM, Amazon, all the big enterprises like Microsoft, they're driving massive scale. So there's a huge change in, oh, the open source community around how to deal with scale. This is a big topic of conversation. What's your thoughts on this? Any general opinions on how the scale is in the open source equation? Is it more towards platforms, less tools, vice versa? >>Is there any trends you see? I think it's interesting because I think when I think of scale, I think both, um, volume, right? Or quantity as, as the hyperscalers do. I think also it's about complexity. I think. I think the public clouds have great volume that they have to deal with in numbers of systems, but they have the ability to customize leveraging development teams and leveraging open source software. They can customize, they can customize all the way down to the servers and the processor chips as we know, um, for most folks, right? They scale, but when they scale across on prem and off prem, it's adding complexity for them. And I think automation has value both in solving volume issues around scale, but also in complexity issues around scale. So even, you know, mid size businesses, if they want to leverage on prem and Off-prem to them, that's complexity scale. >>And I think automation has a huge amount of value to bring that abstracts away. The complexity automation provides the job satisfaction, but also the benefits of efficiency. Absolutely. And to me the greatest value of efficiency is now there's more time to bring in innovation. Right? It's a, it's a Stephanie, a last thing I was wondering, what feedback are you hearing from customers? You know, one of the things that struck me, we were talking about the JP Morgan is they made great progress, but he said they had about a year of working with the security of the cyber, the control groups to help get them through that knothole of allowing them to really deploy automation. So you know, usually something like ansible, you'd, oh, I can get a team, >>let me get it going, but oh wait, no, hold on. Corporate needs to make its way through what is, is that something you hear generally? Is that a large enterprise thing? You know, what, what, what are you hearing >>from your customers that you're talking about? I think, I think we see it more and more and it came up in the discussions today. The technical aspect is one aspect. The sort of cultural or the the ability to pull it in is a whole separate aspect. And you think that technology for right, all of us who are engineers, we think Coldwell, that's the tough bit, but actually the culture bit is just as hard. One thing that I see over and over again is the way companies are structured has a big impact. The more siloed the teams are, do they have a way to communicate? Because fixing that so that when you bring in automation, it has that ability to sort of drive more ubiquitous value across. But if you're not structured to leverage that, it's really hard if your it ops guys don't talk to the application folks. >>Bringing that value is very hard. So I think it is kind of going along in parallel, right? The technical capabilities is one aspect. How you get your organization structured to reap the benefits is another aspect. Um, and it's a journey that's, that's really what I see from folks. It is a journey. And um, I think it's inspiring to see the stories here when they come back and talk about it. But to me the most, the greatest thing about is just start, right? Just start wherever you are. And our goal is to try and help on ramps for folks wherever their journey is. >>It's a great option for people's careers and certainly the modernization of the enterprise and public sector and governments from how they procure technology to how they deploy it and consume it is radically changing a lens very quickly by the way to scale and these things are happening. Yeah, I've got to get your take, and I want to get your expert opinion on this because you've again been in the industry, you have so many different experiences. The cloud one dato was the era of compute storage. Startups can start at an airbnb start. All these companies are examples of, you know, cloud scale. But now as we started to get into the impact to businesses in the enterprise with hybrid cloud, there's a cloud 2.0 equation again. We mentioned observability was just network management, like white space, small category, which you know, companies going public. It's that important now kind of subsystem of cloud 2.0 automation seems to feel the same way we believe. What's your definition of cloud 2.0 cloud one Datto is simply stand up some storage and compete. Use the public cloud and cloud 2.0 enterprise. What does that mean to you? What does, how would you describe cloud 2.0 >>so my view is cloud one. Dot. Oh, was all about capability. Cloud two, Datto is all about experience and that is bringing a whole new way that we look at every product in the stack, right? It has to be a seamless, simple experience. And that's where automation and management comes in and spades. Um, because all of that stuff you needed in capability, having it be secure, having it be reliable, resilient, all of that still has to be there. But now you're now you need the, so to me it's all about the experience and how you pull that together and that's why we're hoping, you know, I'm thrilled here to be an ansible fest because the more I can work with the teams that are doing ansible and insights in the management aspect and the automation, it'll make the real experience better. Software drives it all. Absolutely. Absolutely. Thanks for sharing your insights on the queue. Pleasure coming back on. And great to see you. Great to be here. Good to see you about coverage here in Atlanta. I'm Sean first. Stu Miniman cube coverage here at ansible fest. More coverage after the short break. We'll be right back.

live from Atlanta Georgia it's the tube covering ansible fest 2019 brought to you by Red Hat hello everyone welcome to the queue we are broadcasting live here in Atlanta Georgia I'm John force too many men my co-host the cubes coverage of Red Hat ansible Fest this is probably one of the hottest topic areas that we've been seeing in Enterprise tech emerging along with observability automation and observability is the key topics here automation is the theme stew ansible just finished their keynote keynote analysis general availability of their new platform the ansible automation platform is the big news this is a big I mean it seems nuanced for the general tech practitioner out there what's ansible doing why we here we saw the rise of network management turned into observability as the hottest category in the cloud cloud 2.0 companies going public a lot of M&A activity and observability is data-driven automations this other category that is just exploding and growth and change huge impact to all industries and it's coming from the infrastructure scale side where the blocking and tackling of DevOps has been this is the focus of ansible and their show automation for all your analysis of the keynote what's the most important thing going on here yes so John as you said automation is a super hot topic you know I was just at the New Relic show talking about observability last week we've got the Pedro Duty show also going on this week the the automation is so critical we know that IT can't keep up with things if they can't automate it and it's not just replacing some scripting I loved in the keynote they talked about strategically thinking about automation we've been watching the RP a companies talking about automation so there's lots of different automation there's the right way to do it and another thing angle John that we love covering is you know what's going on with open source you were just at the open core summit in San Francisco the Red Hat team very clear open source is not their business model it is they use open source and everything that Red Hat does is a hundred percent open source and that was core and key to what ansible was and how its created this isn't a product pitch here it's a community you know it's John this is the six most active you know repository in github so out of over a hundred million repositories out there the six most active so that tells you that this is being used by the community it's not a couple of companies using this but it's a broad ecosystem we hear Microsoft and Cisco f5 lots of companies that are contributing as well as just all of the end users we of JPMorgan in the keynote this morning so a lot of participation there but you know it is building out that suite with the platform that you talked about and we're gonna spend a lot of time in the next few days understanding this maturation and growth yeah the automation platform that they announced that's the big news the general availability of their automation platform and stew the word they're using here is scale okay and this is something that you brought up to open core summit which I attended last week was the inaugural conference a lot of controversy and this is a generational shift we are seeing in the midst of our own eyes right in front of us on the ground floor of a shift in open source community how the platform of open source is evolving what Amazon now azure and Google and the others are doing is they're showing that scale has changed the game in how open-source is going to not only grow and evolve but shape application developers and the reason why ansible is so important right now in this conference is that we all know that when you stand up stuff infrastructure you've got to configure the hell out of it DevOps has always been infrastructure is code and as more stuff gets scaled up as more stuff gets provision as more stuff gets built and created the management and the controlling of the configurations this has been a real hot spot this has been an opportunity and a problem so you know everyone who's here they're they're active because you know what this is a major pain point this is a problem area that's an opportunity to take what is a blocking and tackling operational role configurating standing up infrastructure enabling applications and making it a competitive advantage this is why the game is changing starting to see platforms not tools your analysis are they positioned was this keynote successful John and I really liked rut Robin Bergeron came out and talked about the key principles of what antal is done its simplicity its modularity and it's learning from open source this project was only started in 2012 so one of the things I always look at is in the old days you wanted you know to have that experience there's no compression algorithm for experience today if I could start from day one today and build with the latest tools you know heavily using DevOps understanding all of the experience that's happened in open source we can move forward so from 2012 to 2015 Red Hat you know acquired ansible to today in 2019 they're making huge growth and helping companies really leverage and mature their IT processes and move towards you know true business innovation with leveraging automation dude this is not and again this is not for the faint of heart either again these are Rockstar DevOps infrastructure folks who are evolving in taking either network and or infrastructure development to enable and software abstraction layer for applications and this not it's not a joke either I mean got some big names up on stage of just one tweet I want to call out and get your reaction to JP Morgan on his presentation the exact there he was tweet came out from Christopher Festa 500 developers are working to automate business processes leading to among other benefits ninety-eight percent improvement in recovery times what used to take six to eight hours to recover now takes two to five minutes Christopher Festa student so John that's what we want is how can we take these things that took you know hours and I had to go through this ticketing process and make that change what I loved of what Chris from JP Morgan said is he brought us inside he said look to make this change it took us a year of sorting through the security the cyber the the control processes we understand there's not just you know oh hey let's sprinkle a little DevOps on everything and it's wonderful we need to get you know buy-in from the team it you know and it can spread between groups and you know change that culture it's something that you know we've tracked in Red Hat for years and all of these environments this something that does require commitment because it's not just John taking oh I scripted something and and and that's good we need to be able to really look at these changes because automation if we just automate a bad process that's not gonna help our business we really need to make sure we understand what we're automating the business value and and what is going are going to be the ramification to what we're doing well one of the things I want to share with folks watching is some research that we did at Silk'n angle the cube and wiki bond it's part of our cube insights do I know you were part of this we talked to a bunch of practitioners and customers and dozens of our of our community members and we found that observability we've just pointed out has been you know explosive category that automation has been identified and we're putting a stake in the ground right here in the cube as one of the next big sectors that will rise up as a small little white space will become a massive market automation you watch that cloud 2.0 sector called automation why the reasoning was this and here's the results of our of our survey automation is quickly becoming a critical foundational element of the network as enterprises focus on multi cloud network being infrastructure servers and storage a multi cloud rapid application development and deployment software-defined everything's happening pretty much we've been covering that on the cube and most enterprises are just crap lling with this concept and see opportunities the benefits that people see in automation as we've discovered still in the following one focused on focused efforts for better results efficiency security is a top driver on all these things because you got to have security built into the software and then automation is creating job satisfaction for these guys I mean they've been doing this is mundane tasks being automated way so people are happier so job satisfaction and finally this is an opportunity to rescale do these are the key bullet points that we found in talking to our serve our community your reaction to those those results yeah John I love that we know ultimately when we want to be able to provide not only better value to my ultimate end user but I need to look internal as you said John you know how can i you know retool some of my sales force and get them engaged and if you want to hire the Millennials they want a bit just and not be doing the drudgery they want to do something where they feel that they are making a difference and you know you laid out a lot of good reasons why it would help and why people would want to get involved John you know the government I've talked to a number of government agencies when they talk about you know we changed that 40-year old process and now we're doing things faster and better and that means I can really hire that next generation of workforce because otherwise I wouldn't be able to hire them to just do things the old way this is about cloud 2 point and this is about modernization and you mention open source open core summit that I think is a tell sign that open source is changing the communities are changing this is gonna be a massive wave again we've been chronicling this cloud 2 point of the week we coined that term we're trying to identify those key points obviously observability automation but look at the end of the day you got to have a focused effort to make the job go better you heard JP Morgan pointing out minutes versus hours this is the benefits of infrastructure as code in the end of the day employee satisfaction the people that you want to hire to re-skill that can be redeployed into new roles analytics math quantitative analysis versus the mundane tasks automation is going to impact all aspects of the stack so final questions do what are you expecting for the next two days we're gonna be here for two days what do you expect to hear from our guests yeah so John one of the things I'm going to really look at is as you mentioned infrastructure is that where this all started so you know how do I easy to play a VM you know ansible is there you know VMware I've already talked to a number of people in the virtualization community they love and embrace ansible we saw Microsoft up on stage loving embrace it as we move towards micro service architectures containerization and all of these cloud native deployments you know how is ansible in this community doing where the stumbling blocks to be honest from what I hear John coming into this anta Buhl's been doing well Red Hat has helped them grow even more and the expectation is that IBM will help proliferate this in even further the traditional competitors to ansible you think about the chef's in puppet to the world have been struggling with that cloud native world John I know I see ansible when I go to the cloud shows and I hear customers talking about it so ansible seems to be making that transition towards cloud native well but other threats in the cloud native world you know if I've said you know that when I when I go to the server lists you know conference I I don't I have not yet heard you know where this fits into the environment so we always know that that next generation and technology you know how will you know this automation move forward as Red Hat starts to get much more proliferating into major enterprises with IBM which will take their extend their lead even further in the enterprise it's an opportunity for ansible and the community angle is interesting I saw our tweets don't get your community your angle real quick on this I saw a tweet from NetApp their tagline at their booth is simplify automate and orchestrate sounds like they're leading into the kubernetes world containers you got to start thinking about software abstractions and this is the st. the you know provisioning hardware anymore whole new ballgame your assessment of an Sable's community presence mentioned I was a tweet from Red Hat I mean NetApp what's your take on the community angle here John it's all about community we the github stats speak for themselves this is very much a community invent you know kudos to the team here a lot on the diversity inclusion effort so really pushing those things forward John something we always notice at the tech shows the ratio of you know gender is way to more diverse at an event like this we know we see it in the developer communities that there was more diversity in there so by the way when they took over this hotel all of the bathrooms are I believe it's you know it's gender-neutral so you can use whatever bathroom yeah you know you you want there let's make sure I'm using the right pronoun when I'm going saying a lot of people Stu thanks for commentary keynote analysis I'm John first dude minimun breaking down why we are here why ansible why is automation important we believe automation will be a killer category we want to see a lot of growth here and again the impact is with machine learning and AI this is where it all starts automating the data the technology and the configuration is going to empower the next generation modern enterprise more live coverage from ansible fests after this short break